Issue 20: Jack Belloli

from SPANDREL ROUTINE

Implied

At from moving, Ferdinand as

baboon. Or Ferdinand played as

worm, leech, protozoa, the thud

of my life. Ferdinand gone over,

with the rake, on the fat of the

hands. Ferdinand as an atlas for

dust. As windfall and as elephant.

Against the spirit of the thing, a

shot on him as a partisan over the

course of the final days, his love

burying him upside down in the

hay, projected to slash and bathe

Sebastian’s faith in the dark. At

chess, even when within, I propose

him to be another angel, watching

all this with the pen for it at his

lips. As a man taking up a room. As

a lad who will not be participant     

with the woods he’s raising, prone

to demanding the trees be their own

tax belt. Then, delivered whistling,

as if it will be run through and will

be done as prose, Ferdinand takes

every light out on himself at the

mass for the evening of the world,

stacks his thinking carapace at the

altar, scoots to his own extinct event.

Wedded

Only the kind in cages, our kind:

born forth on different springs,

but cut to drink and waste at a

single pot. There is draff with us,

and feathers and flecks of gold,

wriggling at the moisture around

the seal, until any tidy botany’s

kept on hold. Love bears in glass,

as a bee can breed mediation. We

are bought to wilt with a universal

zeal. The stock yards will stop

tanks and ponder their due to us.

The factories shall be kept to as

we run down on the sands. Each

pared plant must rinse and refract.

My shares in glass, and your part

in my video, fasten us to a plot

with plastic filaments, no matter

how long our march to it is. We’ll

rid the pavements of alive petrol.

The arc lights isolate a fleece in dew,

frogged at the neck like a reused

bottle, dried out, up from the bank.

Jack Belloli’s writing on contemporary poetry has been published in Poetry London, Prac Crit, 3:AM Magazine, Review 31, The Scores and The Cambridge Humanities Review. Other poems from this sequence have appeared in Tenebrae and amberflora.

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